On Trust

Book 2 Revival opens Chapter One with me settling into dorm life at Shasta College at sixteen years old in 1984. I find a competent counselor and begin weekly sessions with him. I enjoy friendships with some people who still work at Stepping Stones, the group home where I recently graduated. One of these friendships becomes a romantic relationship.

I visit with my mother and her girlfriend at holidays. In one incident in the Redding area, I become a victim of the crime of theft and vandalism. I begin work study at the Shasta College Theater when I am seventeen. I find a studio apartment in Redding and move there after my first year in the college dorms. I learn how to drive and pass my driving tests with perfect scores. My boyfriend moves in with me at my studio. Before long, we move to a one-bedroom apartment that is the downstairs of an old house. We get two small dogs.

My boyfriend and I both lose weight. Slim and trim, my boyfriend joins the Air Force. Slim and trim, I stay home. After spending one summer as a firefighter, I decide to take a year off from school to work, but I have trouble finding much. I am back in school within a semester. My boyfriend and I break up.

Learning to live in the real world on my own at the age of sixteen was difficult, but not without its own particular pleasures. I remember that having my own keys was a big deal. All the counselors at Stepping Stones, the group home where I lived, had rings of keys they wore on their belts. The key rings were symbols that they were in control of our lives. My own keyring meant I was in control of my own life, finally. This was a really good feeling, but also scary in a way. At sixteen, I was handed the keys to my life, but I was ill equipped to deal with that fact in a lot of ways.

I called my mom frequently for solace and advice the first three years I was on my own and beyond. She always gave really sound, good advice. I wasn’t always able to hear it. I would often mistake her advice as her telling me what to do, so sometimes I bristled at it. But when I listened to her from my heart, I could accept her point of view and learn from it. I could hear her central concern: my own well-being. I don’t know what I would have done without her.

There was also a part of me that had a hard time trusting my mom and her advice, though. How could I trust her when she’d let me down for all those years when I still lived in her home? She’d failed to protect me from my father and when at long last I finally asked for help outright, she literally turned me down. I had to leave these things in the past and continue moving forward with my life.

PTSD makes it very difficult to leave things in the past. Flashbacks and their triggers bring the past right up into your face and do so, at times, frequently. I’ve had to learn what my triggers are and work to avoid them. I’ve also had to learn what to do when triggers attack, to minimize their effects.

My biggest trigger is stress. With stress I feel anxiety which can often translate into sleep disturbance. If my sleep is disturbed, I often find myself on the verge of a hypomanic episode. In the throes of a hypomanic episode, I experience all the symptoms of a manic episode without the euphoria. It’s all of the pain and none of the fun. Any sleep disturbance, even for one night, is often the first sign that a hypomanic state is on the way for me. The biggest fear for me is being in the midst of a hypomanic period and then, with enough lack of sleep, I can experience psychosis. Psychosis is my biggest fear at this point in my life.

My last hypomanic episode was only recently resolved. With this one, I found myself on the verge of psychosis after several years since my last psychotic episode. I was speeding through the errands I had to run in town one day, after more than two weeks of sleep disturbance, when the world started to seem surreal. Exhaustion set in and I felt like the edges of the world started to warble, as if another world existed beyond the edges of this one. This was a very scary experience. I started an activity that helped to anchor me in the moment, using distraction at first and then mindfulness. Then I made an attempt at using my training in IFS to hold that psychotic part in compassion. I started to calm down and found that the anxiety melted away. Then I was just left with the exhaustion. I found a way to make myself sleep that night and my hypomanic state started to ease. I was on my way out of it.

Any exercise in trust involves learning to trust myself. I am my own best gauge of myself, having lived in my own skin for the past 49 years. In my example above, I had to trust that I knew what to do for myself and then trust myself to carry that out. This was my first test in a long time. Thank God it worked!

I hope this level of self-disclosure on my part is helpful to others in some way. Peace.